Marisia - Maros Megyei Múzeum Évkönyve 33/4. (2013)

Articles

CHURCHYARDS IN THE TRANSYLVANIAN BASIN FROM THE 11thTO THE FIRST HALF OF THE 13th CENTURIES. ON THE BEGINNING OF INSTITUTIONALIZED

CHRISTIANITY

Erwin gall

Keywords: Christianism, church, burial custom, grave goods, settlement Cuvinte cheie: cretinism, bisericä, rit §i ritual funerar, inventar funerar, habitat

In our effort to summarise the churchyards in the Transylvanian Basin, although a lot of questions remained unanswered, we have managed to find some interpretations for several problems concerning the sociological and historical phenomena of the different segments of the 11th-13th century society.

Churchyards are the most obvious and reliable indicators of institutionalised Christianity. As opposed to the other regions of Europe, there is no clear archaeological evidence of institutionalised Christianity in the Transylvanian Basin from before the ll‘h century.

We also formulated the question: to what extent could the population of these cemeteries be Christian ? The characteristics of these cemeteries seem to show that the members of these communities were Christian. In several cases, unusual or strange burial customs can be documented. Although the Christian church banned some rites in the fight against paganism, based upon the archaeological finds, we can suppose a continuity of these in a few cases.

In the analysis of churchyards we could draw a detailed picture of the formation and development of the structure of the medieval settlement network. The connection between the power centres and these types of cemeteries may have been detected only in an indirect way. The use of two or three cemeteries in the centres well-known from the written sources may emphasise the possibility of the classification of society.

1. Introduction1

In the past years, the research of 11th to 13th century churchyards produced significant new results in the Transylvanian Basin. A series of scholarly studies were written about the latest discoveries, several former excavation results were re-evaluated, and many preliminary research reports were published about former investigations.2

Even so, among the specific fields of medieval archaeology, the survey of medieval Christian cemeteries can be regarded as the least favoured issues in the Carpathian Basin, and especially in the

1 This work was possible with the financial support of the Sectoral Operational Programme for Human Resources Development 2007-2013, co-financed by the European Social Fund, under the project number POSDRU 89/1.5/S/61104.

21 would like to express my appreciation to some colleagues and friends for the data, information and correction they helped me with: Mátyás Bajusz, Ünige Bencze, István Botár, Zsolt Csók, Andrea Demjén, Csongor Derzsi, Zalán Győrfi, Radu Harhoiu, Keve László, László Kovács, Zsolt Nyárádi, Attila Petrovits, Péter Prohászka, Ágnes Ritoók, András Sófalvi and Csaba Tóth. Some of the drawings I used (Dábáca- Castle Area IV, Däbäca-A. Tämas’s garden) were made by Emese Apai. I am deeply indebted to Maxim Mordovin for proofreading this study.

Transylvanian Basin. In the Romanian archaeology, Kurt Horedt was the first who referred to the laws of King Ladislaus I and King Coloman the Learned in the context of medieval churchyards;3 later his ideas spread in archaeological reasoning as axioms, it also highlights the generality of the ‘mixed argumentation characteristic of the 20th century. In archaeology the term ‘gemischte Argumentation is generally used for interpretations in Romania (independently of the national identity of the author). It means that when the analysis of archaeological finds or archaeological facts is made, it is supported by the interpretation of other archaeological data or hypotheses, or by historical facts and circumstances, or in some worse cases by historical hypotheses.4 In this case it would mean that Transylvanian archaeology dated every cemetery from the end of the 11th century based on the laws of King Ladislaus I and King Coloman the Learned without examining or carrying out a chronological analysis of each site. Nevertheless, in European

3 Horedt 1958a, 145.

4 On the gemischte Argumentation, see Bálint 1995, 245-248; Niculescu 1997,63-69; Brather 2004. The term was first used by Joachim Werner. Werner 1979, 9-10.

MARISIA XXXIII, 2013, p. 135-250